In brief
- Amazon is looking for a strategy and roadmap for blockchain-based payment products.
- It's advertised for blockchain-related positions in the past.
Every once in a while a job posting will kick off a flurry of rumors in the crypto space, as industry watchers want to know whether a new mega corporation such as Apple or Facebook is set to adopt cryptocurrency payments.
That happened today with Amazon, which recently listed a job posting for a Digital Currency and Blockchain Product Lead to create a vision and roadmap for new payment products.
A subsequent statement shared with Decrypt and other media outlets by an Amazon spokesperson fanned the flames by suggesting the world's largest online retailer is actively considering enabling cryptocurrency payments.
"We’re inspired by the innovation happening in the cryptocurrency space and are exploring what this could look like on Amazon," the statement reads. "We believe the future will be built on new technologies that enable modern, fast, and inexpensive payments, and hope to bring that future to Amazon customers as soon as possible."
"Exploring" can mean a lot of things for a huge company with near-unlimited resources and thousands of employees. In particular, per the job posting, the Digital Currency and Blockchain Product Lead should have expertise in cryptocurrencies, central bank digital currencies, and distributed ledgers. The new hire is also expected to "gain leadership buy-in and investment for new capabilities" and develop a "launch strategy." All of which suggests the company is taking a serious look at what crypto can offer it.
"We’re inspired by the innovation happening in the cryptocurrency space and are exploring what this could look like on Amazon."
Amazon has made incremental steps into crypto in the past.
Earlier this month, Amazon Web Services, the company's cloud platform subsidiary, advertised for a Head of Product for its long-running Amazon Managed Blockchain, which takes care of the hosting and hardware for developers who want to build in Hyperledger Fabric or Ethereum. Notably, the posting indicated a preference for applicants with decentralized finance (DeFi) experience, suggesting AWS could be building new capabilities for protocols that leverage a blockchain to offer financial products without intermediaries.
Amazon's Advertising FinTech team has also been looking for a Senior Software Engineer as it works on "financial ledger, billing and reconciliation systems to provide data transparency on transnational financial data." Though the post doesn't mention "blockchain", the URL does.